Lot's daughters : sex, redemption, and women's quest for authority /

Polhemus (English, Stanford), interested in "canonized incest" that has created patterns, figures, and imagery of the older male and younger female in familial modeled relationships, here draws on the story of Lot and his women to argue that these relationship patterns live on in social history and popular culture. Offering a "wild-post-modern vision," Polhemus examines examples of fathers' abandonment and abdication of patriarchal authority and emphasizes the preponderance of male fantasy projections and, conversely, women's desire to increase their own power. Polhemus divides his discussion into three parts--"The Heritage of Lot and His Daughters," "Generating and Representing Modern Daughters of Lot," and "Lot's Daughter at the Millennium"--offering theoretical discussion of sex for pleasure/regeneration, incestuous impulses, the primacy of fathers over daughters, responsibilities of parenthood, split personality in female representations, and female agency. The diverse illustrative materials embrace literary history (e.g., the Pearl poet, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontes), psychoanalysis (Freud and Dora), and modern women (Shirley Temple, Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton, et al.). Along the way he speculates and generalizes that older men and modern women use each other for their own respective benefit. This is a clever, controversial, erudite, and provocative work. ^BSumming Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. S. A. Parker emerita, Hiram College

Before Humbert had his Lolita, Lot had his daughters. In this provocative volume, Polhemus, chair of Stanford's English department, uses the "disreputable Bible story of father-daughter incest" as a lens to understand family and gender relations through the centuries. He casts a wide net over literature (Joyce and Shakespeare), art (Durer and Rubens), psychology (Freud and his famous study of Dora), show business (Shirley Temple and Woody Allen) and politics (Bill and Monica) to argue that the power dynamic between younger women and older men-"in which daughters fall in love with their father's lives and older men are tempted by the intoxicating power and promise of youth"-is integral to our society. Traipsing through so many fields of inquiry allows Polhemus (Erotic Faith) to find Lot's daughters "at the core of modern life and consciousness": a "Lottish spectre of incest" haunts Charlotte Bront?'s Jane Eyre, for example, while Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives puts it all out in the open (it concerns a man having a secret affair with a 20-year-old and was made while Allen was himself having a secret affair with his then wife's adopted daughter). Though dense and rigorous, Polhemus's book is also quite lively: general readers with an interest in any of the figures discussed will be intrigued, and if the book beats its singular note a bit too long, it does so cleanly and fervently. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Polhemus (humanities, Stanford Univ.; Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D.H. Lawrence) takes the incestuous biblical tale of Lot and his daughters and creates a theory he calls the Lot Complex. The complex describes the mutual attraction between older men and younger women and the relationship between fathers and daughters. Polhemus thus shows how an ancient myth is perpetuated in social history and popular culture. Using literature (Shakespeare, Austen), classical art (Durer, Rubens), Freudian theory, and contemporary figures such as Shirley Temple, Woody Allen, and Mia Farrow, Polhemus shows the Lot Complex at work. He also shows that this complex has changed over the last two centuries as women have become empowered and the older male is no longer women's only venue to power. The most interesting chapter traces the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal through the prism of the complex. Though original, this book is somewhat obtuse as it is grounded primarily in literary criticism instead of a purely sociological perspective. An optional purchase for public libraries but recommended for academic libraries, particularly with a women's studies or women's literature collection.-Cathy Carpenter, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.